James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin

In 1962 James Watson (1928- ), Francis Crick (1916- ), and Maurice Wilkins (1916- ) jointly received the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for their determination in 1953 of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Because the Nobel Prize can be awarded only to the living, Wilkins's colleague Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), who died from cancer at the age of thirty-seven, could not be honored. James Watson and Francis Crick The molecule that is the basis for heredity, DNA, contains …

…Cambridge and made fundamental contributions to unlocking the genetic code. He and Sydney Brenner demonstrated that each group of three adjacent bases on a single DNA strand codes for one specific amino acid. He also correctly hypothesized the existence of "transfer" RNA, which mediates between "messenger" RNA and amino acids. After twenty years at Cambridge, with several visiting professorships in the United States, Crick joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.